NODE.JS VS GOLANG; UNLEASH THE SECRETS!

A digital presence for your business requires business logic and other sensitive operations, and here the backend of your app can not be dodged off. Indeed, the backend structure of your app is the most essential part, that defines app quality, performance, scalability among many other factors. Hence it is highly significant to choose the right tool for your project. 

However, when it comes to choosing the right tech stack for backend development, there is a plethora of options. And with such diversity, making a decision without knowing facts about such technologies can be disastrous.

Hence, to help you make the right choice, in this blog post we’re going to focus on the two most promising backend technologies; Node.js and Golang. 

It will help you to learn the facts about these two technologies so you can make the right decision for your project requirement.

Let’s start the journey.

A quick word about Node.js?

Node.js is an open-source, server-side runtime environment that is built on Google Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. It was conceptualized in 2009, and since then has become a most popular environment to build cross-platform applications. Since it is based on JavaScript, it makes it easier for developers to write both client-side and server-side scripts using a single language. 

Brands using Node.js

• NASA
• Linkedin
• Netflix
• PayPal
• Walmart

A quick word about Golang?

It is also popularly known as Go! Golang is basically an open-source, statically-typed, multi-purpose programming language that was created by Google in 2007. It has a specific set of features that offers performance and security benefits of C/C++ and the incredible speed of Python. It is considered to be a structural, strong, and effective backend language with efficient garbage collection handling, memory safety, and dynamic interfaces. It is a preferred language for cloud-based interfaces, networking applications, and real-time application development.

Brands using Golang or Go

• Uber
• Basecamp
• Medium
• BBC
• Intel
• Google

Go Vs Node.js: Performance Factors

1. Ecosystem

JavaScript has existed in the app development field for more than a decade, this makes it a more mature language having enough tools and libraries. On the other hand, Golang is much younger and less popular compared to Node JS yet. Indeed, Golang comes with an impressive set of packages and libraries to use, but it is yet to catch the pace of Node.js.

2. Error Handling

Within the Go, developers are required to implement explicit error checking, and here the compile-time and run-time errors are handled differently, which further raises the issues for the developers. However, with the Node.js, the traditional throw-catch error handling mechanism is followed, which ensures the errors are displayed and corrected immediately before performing any further operation.

3. Performance

Golang is known for being very light-weighted and faster than Node.js. And Node.js is dynamically-typed that is based on an interpreted language to execute slowly compared to the majority of a compiled language. On average, comparing Go vs Node.js real-life performance, both languages have almost the same results.

4. Scalability

The Go language encourages scalability, and this is further proven due to the function goroutines, which can be executed with one another concurrently. The Goroutines lets reliable and easy execution of threads be performed simultaneously. Whereas, the web app development process with Node.js works a little differently, and is considered to be less elegant as the concurrent programming in JavaScript is usually done using event callbacks, which results in inefficient concurrency. It leads to a messy system, also, Node.js is single-threaded, resulting in execution to be performed in sequence.

5. Libraries and tools

Surprisingly, Go being a new language, still comes with decent libraries and packages. However, compared to Node.js it lacks certain tools, hence developers need to research to manually configure it.

On the other hand, when it comes to Node.js, there is a wide number of tools, frameworks, and libraries available for developers to build different types of apps. Further, there is a huge community for Node.js that offers extended support for every type of development tasks.

And the trophy goes to…

NONE! The reason is both of these backend languages have their own sets of ups and downs. Hence, it is hard to decide whether Node.js or Golang is better. These both languages are growing, as per StackOverFlow, Node.js is the most popular programming language, whereas Golang is also ranked among the top 5 most loved programming languages.

So it largely depends on the type and characteristics of the app you want to create, and Go and Node.js are good at different things. 

Final takeaway

Well, these all clearly conclude that there is no perfect language when it comes to app development, and depends on the type of application you want to build. 

Can’t decide which language to choose? 

Give us a call and we’d help you to make the right decision depending on your app requirements.